Today we began our unit on the music of English--the patterns of rhythm, pitch, volume and speed that native speakers use. During this unit, we will learn about word stress and sentence stress. Things like stress, intonation and pitch are also called prosody. That is not a common word. That is a word for English teachers.
Before we study English prosody, we need to learn how to count syllables.
Today we talked about poetry. Rhythm is important for poetry. Rhythm is also important when you learn a new language. You need to use the rhythm of that language. If you speak English using Arabic rhythm or Chinese rhythm, people may find it difficult to understand you.
For our first exercise, we did some listening. We listened to words with one, two, three and four syllables. We also did some oral practice with contrasts like: prayed / parade; clone / cologne; state and estate.
Then we looked at four very short poems and counted the syllables in each line. Every poem had a pattern of five, seven and five syllables. This is called a haiku. It is a very old form of poetry from Japan. The most famous haiku poet was Basho.
Finally, we got into groups of three and wrote our own haiku poems. One person from each group came up to select a picture or piece of artwork to inspire the poem.
Ina, Wen and Layla chose a picture of a father in a park with his baby in a stroller.
Florin, Bashar and Ghadeer wrote their haiku about a snowy scene. That painting was done by one of the Group of Seven artists. They are very well known in Canada.
Angela, Annonciata and Lina wrote their haiku about a little girl holding a toy rabbit and looking through a window.
That was fun!
See you in the lab on Tuesday!
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